Feminism and film theory To understand and critique gender hierarchies and

patriarchal ideologies in commercial narrative cinema.

To define the terms of an alternative, feminist aesthetics; the search for a “feminine” style or language.

in popular films (e.g., Arzner) in experimental or avant-garde films by feminist filmmakers.

To define the specificity of female spectatorship; i.e., forms of identification, understanding, and pleasure that are appropriate to the psychology and cultural experience of women as opposed to men.

Feminism and film theory 1972: the first two women's film festivals organized

in New York and Edinburgh; Women and Film begins publishing in California.

1973: Season of women's cinema organized by Claire Johnston at the National Film Theatre in London; publication of "Notes on Women's Cinema."

1975: Screen begins publishing feminist film theory, beginning with Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

1976: Camera Obscura, Frauen und Film.

Feminism and film theory Essentialism: a core identity that defines women

psychologically. That there is a repressed, integral experience appropriate to women's bodies and lives that is no less powerful because of its invisibility or marginality in patriarchal culture.

The objective of women's filmmaking (and history) is to restore the visibility of women's experience to the screen, or to replace negative images of women with positive ones.

In contrast, the anti-essentialist position argues that sexual difference was constructed in language and through aesthetic forms.

Laura Mulvey A feminist (counter)aesthetic must

examine, challenge, and transform the form and position of identification offered by dominant cinema.

“A politics of the unconscious”: The structuring of desire in relation to lack is

most often articulated as an imaging of women from the point of view of male fantasies.

The forms of visual pleasure and point of view in Hollywood cinema work for the control of the male subject by objectifying images of women.

Construction of these images is meant to contain a threat that can be a source for a potential feminist counter-cinema.

Laura Mulvey “An active/passive heterosexual division of

labor controls narrative structure.”

Male FemaleActive PassiveOrigin of look Object of lookNarrative Spectacle

Laura Mulvey Fetishism overplays the woman's objectification,

puts her on a pedestal, builds up the glamour and physical beauty of the female store, invests in her the potential for erotic satisfaction.

Voyeurism is associated with a fantasy of mastery and control,

"asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. The sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and ends" (205).

Feminism and counter-cinema The feminist critique of Screen’s project. To define the terms of a feminist counter-

cinema Popular cinema expresses contradictions

concerning sexual difference that it fails to master. The aggressivity of looking can be turned against

the spectator. The female image given as lack "constantly

endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as a one-dimensional fetish" (209).

Feminism and counter-cinemaVoyeurism FetishismSadism [Negation]Narrative Spectacle---------------------------------------------Linearity StasisUnity DisunityAction InterruptionDepth FlatnessIllusion Defamiliarization

Mary Ann Doane Address. How the “woman’s film” targets a female

audience through marketing, themes, plot structures, and prominence of female protagonists.

Spectatorship. What Doane calls “the projected image of the female spectator”: How films organize scenarios of looking in order to outline how they prefer to be read.

– (In the woman’s film, the activity of looking on the part of the female protagonist is often punished and returned to the male.)

Subject-position or identification. What psychoanalytic concepts best characterize femininity or feminine identification?

“Film and the Masquerade” The woman as image is assigned a

special place in narrative cinema, yet positions of point of view, identification, and pleasure seem to be denied to her.

“What, then, of the female spectator? What can one say about her desire in relation to this process of imaging?”

Doane on the female spectator Proximity and distance Female spectatorship as transvestitism Female spectatorship as “masquerade” of

femininity.— “The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it a

distance.”— “Masquerade . . . constitutes an acknowledgment

that it is femininity itself which is constructed as mask . . . . To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image.”

Doane on the female spectator The characterization of femininity as closeness or over-

identification is a cultural stereotype closing off other possibilities of identification.

The options of female spectatorship in this respect:1. Adopting masculinity.2. The masochism of over-identification or losing one’s self in the image.3. Narcissism in becoming one’s own object of desire. This too is a

fantasy of being one with the image; in Hollywood cinema, this often mean’s becoming one with the fantasized image of masculine desire.

“The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman.”